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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be, and I am only slightly being hyperbolic, are trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear, not some guy who signed up for reasonable reasons like access to college or career training or the darker reasons.
We already saw this in Ukraine - lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.
The actual thing that'll probably stop Chinese hypersonic missiles is a combination of they probably don't really exist in the way that anti-woke people hype them up online in the obsessive way they tend too, a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal, and the fact we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up the way the Chinese do to look strong.
Even the New York Times is busting out the high-grade copium: 'Ukraine doesn't need all its territory to beat Putin'. The tone is that of a rear-guard action, trying to salvage credibility for the next phase of this disaster. Full text here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/18sb5l0/ua_pov_ukraine_doesnt_need_all_its_territory_to/
Whatever issues China has with procurement, they're light-years ahead of the US. China's navy is growing while the US fleet shrinks. They also have 232x times more shipbuilding capacity than the US, per US estimates. I'd be wary before fighting a naval war (as an industrial dwarf) against the world's leading shipbuilder.
I'll take failures out in the open over a secret, unknown, hypothetical success. If the US fleet is so powerful, why can't US allies get their shipping through Suez? If it's so easy to shoot down these missiles, hypersonic or otherwise, why are Ukrainian cities constantly being bombed? Patriots were provided after all.
Can you imagine how insane the current situation would have seemed in February 2022 in Ukraine? “Oh, Ukraine is losing an ongoing war of attrition in December 2023 while still controlling the vast majority of the country, while Russia has thrown 300,000 lives and unfathomable amounts of its best hardware at the conflict, what?”. The official intelligence assessment on the eve of the war by the West was so dire that they evacuated every major embassy in Kiev (likely after the usual kind of warning from Russia) to avoid any risky diplomatic incidents during the Russian invasion, which they presumed would certainly be successful at capturing Kiev.
The US won in Ukraine by the first week of the war. Everything since then is bleeding Russia for free without risking a single American serviceman’s life. The cost is minuscule - food stamps cost vastly more, as do countless other bullshit federal programs - and much of Russia’s most elite fighting capacity has been slaughtered and replaced with 80 IQ Central Asian peasant conscripts using WW1 trench tactics. Sure, Ukraine is destroyed, but they wanted to fight and, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Farquad, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.
The reason the US is reluctant to attack the Houthis on land is that a big goal of US foreign policy under Biden was to support the Saudi peace deal with the Houthis. Biden personally promised that the US would cut support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, essentially pressuring them into peace. It would be an embarrassing move for the Democrats to reverse course now and to fight the Saudis’ war against the Houthis for them. If the neocons had been listened to (Trump listened to them, which is why he vetoed a plan to stop US support for anti-Houthi forces) the Houthis might well no longer be an issue.
Coincidentally, just today I saw a video of Ukrainian soldiers mocking a mentally retarded conscript sent to their trench. https://twitter.com/Alex_Oloyede2/status/1740797508400632195#m
The West is not bleeding Russia for 'free'. It's expensive in terms of munitions, wealth and prestige. Europe is suffering considerable energy costs (in the trillions) as a result of their sanctions program, part of the economic war against Russia. Much of our media went around saying 'oh Ukraine must win to preserve the rules-based order and deter Xi in Taiwan', yet Ukraine is losing. This sets an unhelpful precedent for Xi in China - if there are setbacks at the start of the war, just double down and power on through to ultimate victory.
Once Ukraine is beaten, we'll face a powerful, angry Russia in Europe, closely aligned with China. China is the real winner, they get cheaper gas, a useful ally and a weaker West distracted from Asia.
The much vaunted gas crisis never materialized; European gas prices largely returned to pre-2019 levels in 2023; I said 300,000 casualties, including WIA - KIA is likely in the 70-120k bracket; I don’t think fever dreams of Ed Krassenstein Twitter types mean that the Pentagon “expected” Ukraine to win (if anything quite the opposite).
This means exactly the opposite of what you think it does. If even an interminably corrupt, poor, kleptocratic, bureaucratic shithole like Russia can get its act together this much in a crisis, it means the US and other Western could likely jump to serious war footing much faster than naysayers predict. They merely do not yet care, because bleeding Russia in Ukraine for as long as possible is so minor in terms of both blood and treasure for the United States.
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